By Murray Coleman

As noted last week, analysts have been fairly bullish lately on smaller boutique investment bankers/asset managers Greenhill(GHL) and Evercore Partners (EVR). Both seemingly sit at the sweet spot of rising M&A activity as well as an aging population needing to sock more money away towards retirement.

Today, the latest global rankings of deal making activity shows both jumped on the lists of most active M&A advisory players put together by Dealogic. Preliminary results were released ahead of the first-quarter’s end on Thursday.

Greenhill landed at No. 12 while Evercore was a notch higher. Interestingly, Goldman Sachs (GS) fell to No. 5 among the quarter’s most active M&A advisors after missing out on last week’s $39 billion between AT&T(T)and Deutsche Telekom’s (DTEGY) T-Mobile unit.

Greenhill’s trading down 0.7% this morning. But Evercore’s up slightly.

About Focus on Funds

As exchange-traded funds and other investing vehicles have ballooned in number, the task of figuring out what works well and what doesn’t has only gotten harder. Barrons.com’s Focus on Funds looks under the hood of ETFs, mutual funds and hedge funds for overlooked values, actionable ideas and the latest pitfalls for fund investors.

Chris Dieterich has covered the U.S. stock market for The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. He is a graduate of Regis University and the Missouri School of Journalism.